Terminal 2, which is mostly European destinations has had a change in policy at the security checkpoint, and unless it's part of a staged change, it somewhat baffles me. All airports ask for you boarding card just before you put your bags through the security checkpoint. Unless you're traveling to a destination that requires passport control, they don't ask for your ID, just your boarding card. They normally check to make sure the date and origin/destination airport correspond to when and where you're boarding. It's a real fast check. No other measures really required.

However, with the introduction of online check-ins and auto-checkins, they now verify your identity at the boarding gate, making sure the name corresponds to that printed on the card. Many people have written ways to workaround this issue and I'm not going to talk about that. What baffles me though about the change in FRA is that now, before you pass security, instead of them just looking at your boarding card, they've added an extra layer. They are verifying it on the computer. I assume this is to make sure that the flight number exists and corresponds to that printed on the card. They still however don't ask for your ID. This is done when boarding. Now FRA normally has queues to get though security and sometimes it gets really long depending on the time of day. This step is just adding more to the already large bottleneck that the security checkpoint is, and yet doesn't provide that many advantages. If they want to add an extra security layer of verifying the ticket number and other information that would be "hard" to come by, why do it at a central point? Why not distribute the load between the different boarding gates. They already take an extra 5 seconds to verify the ID matches the ticket, why not do the boarding verification there too? Plus, unless it's a home-printed boarding card, all "normal" boarding cards have a magnetic strip that goes through a machine that checks the data on it.